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The yoga of hidden goals that rearrange your life

Svadyaya, self-study, is one of the guiding practices or values of yoga, one of the niyamas, and is often taken to mean the study of texts or of the breath.

Studying habits and patterns, though, can make tectonic shifts how you live your life. This kind of study, though, has to be courted; it can’t be undertaken on a schedule. You have to be ready when the text opens itself and clear enough to see what it’s telling you.

Yoga, you’ve heard over and over, means “yoking.” Yoga is the union of seeming opposites – sun & moon, light & dark, active & inactive, inbreath & outbreath, effort and surrender. Yoga also happens when we’re able to see how opposites intersect in our own bodies, lives and psyches and not take sides. Like that moment when you realize that you really can be happy for someone else and sad for yourself (or visa versa) at the same time, and they’re not like matter and anti-matter, canceling one another or causing your very substance to blink out of existence from the seeming contradiction.

“Yoga” refers to the internal logic of life. When you begin to listen to your life and view it from a place of expansive consciousness, it gets a little Joseph Campbell on you. The deeper reality that allows the seeming contradictions to co-exist begins to surface like artifacts in the desert after a rain and the thing that’s always bugged you about how you live your life, react to stress or talk to yourself in between the words you say out loud becomes utterly clear, obvious and undeniable, like a skeleton bleached under the sun on a vast landscape of air and sky.

Only when you make space for these seeming revelations (the truth has been there all along) can you begin to see how your own internal logic has been using all your well-planned, deeply cherished goals to weave its own fabric from your life.

This is the reason I come to the mat. Not because this will happen on any given day, or because I can make it happen or force understanding where, right now, there is only longing. But because without this time alone, quiet, in movement and stillness, the internal logic of my life – the thing that’s trying to work itself out, the call that I can almost hear in everything I do, the voice that might be calling out for help and for care, or might be driving me forward – won’t surface through the sands of time, won’t be heard, made scrutable and understood. Without taking this time, the voice in the desert continues calling, unheeded, unheard, mistaking itself for alone.